The Eye of the Storm
by ladyenterprise
Summary: It wasn't the worst storm North Carolina had ever seen. It wasn't even that bad, compared to some of the others that had hit, but it was there, and so was he, stuck in the Morehead City Hurricane Shelter. The experience would change his life. Em POV.
1. A First Time for Everything

BANG!

I hit the floor for what felt like the millionth time that night, clipping my head on the corner of the small table beside my bed.

"Damn." I muttered, lifting my head and squinting against both the pain in my head and the bright light filtering through the useless sheet hanging over the window.

Slowly, I stumbled to the door and out into the hallway, making it to the fridge without further problems. I peered into its industrial depths (it was a relic from the early days of my uncle's business here on the Allen Farm), looking for something to eat while I drank orange juice straight from the carton.

"Eeeee!" screamed a high-pitched voice, just as something grasped my leg and tried to hide between it and the refrigerator, scaring me into spraying orange juice over half the wall.

I looked down and recognized the younger of my twin cousins.

"Jeez, Aidan! Don't scare me like that!" I exclaimed, wiping the juice off my face.

"Shhhh, E!" the three-year-old whispered in that three-year-old way, where they just make their normal voice raspier. "Kyle looking!" he pointed toward the hallway where I faintly heard the light patter of his twin's small feet.

"Right." I said to myself, and grabbed a few slices of pizza left over from last night's movie night and shut the fridge. "Coming, squirt?" I asked Aidan, who was still clinging fearfully to my leg.

He shook his head and I saw his eyes flicker briefly back to the hallway before he took off in the opposite direction. Laughing to myself, I followed him into the living room where he was now hiding behind his sister, my cousin, Scarlett, whose face was, as usual, buried deep within the pages of a thick book.

"Hey Scar," I said, tilting my head to read the title of her book. _The Lord of the Rings_. Fantasy. Figures. "What's up with that bed you've got me sleeping on? It's like a handicapped ramp."

"I'm not a character from _The Lion King_. And your head looks funny when you do that. Dan and Alex were in charge of getting it through the door. They figured it wouldn't matter if two of the legs were gone." Figures. Dan and Alex were the two oldest children in the family and were both notorious for their stupid stunts.

"Ahh. Where are your parents?" Scarlett was ridiculously responsible and motherly for a fifteen-year-old, but it was still suspicious that she was the only one in the house. I plopped down next to her on the couch and finished off the last of my pizza.

"Making deliveries," she flipped a page, "Dan and Alex are out too."

"Everyone's out? Why?"

"Hurricane's coming." She said, pointing over her shoulder to the bay window, through which I could see the ominously purple clouds hovering over the neighborhood.

"Damn." I said for the second time that morning.

"Hey!" Scarlett exclaimed, my foul language finally tearing her eyes from the book. "Keep it rated G, please!" her eyes shot back to where Aidan was hiding in the curtains behind the couch.

"Oh. Yeah, sorry." I apologized.

"Sure you are." She said, her green eyes rolling and returning to the book. "Dad said your delivery instructions were on the walk-in."

"Thanks, Scar." I said, smiling at her childhood nickname.

"No problem, _Emmy_." She spit out my old nickname with all the venom of a rattlesnake. I let out a booming laugh and walked back through the house to my room.

I pulled a pair of worn jeans and the standard white Allen Farms uniform shirt from my drawers and pulled them on as I thought about how I'd ended up making deliveries for my Aunt and Uncle in Nowhere, North Carolina during my break.

It was unbelievable, really, that a few…altercations at school should earn me a two-month sentence in my own personal hell, but that was my parents for you. My other friends had just gotten a few weeks of phone-less car-less chores, but _I_ got to deliver gallons of milk, cartons of eggs, and sacks of flour to various locations across eastern North Carolina with my idiot cousins. Big fun.

As soon as I was fully dressed, I headed out the back door to the outbuilding that held the walk-in fridge and freezer. I entered through the back door, wandering through the stacks of supplies until I got to the walk-in. There, taped to the sturdy gray metal, I found my instructions written on the back of a grimy old cell phone bill.

_Emmett,_

_I need you to make a special delivery to the Morehead City Hurricane Shelter. Their regular supplier can't make deliveries this early, and I promised to send them at least a half-load before the storm hits. I'll give you a bonus if you do me this favor._

_Ben_

Underneath was a list of the needed supplies and an address for what I assumed was the Hurricane Shelter.

_Great_, I thought, moaning out loud. Morehead was at least an hour and a half away on a good day, and with the storm about to hit, driving was not likely to be a blast.

Nevertheless, I began loading the last van with as many supplies as I could fit. After every carton, jug, and sack had been secured, I slammed the double doors and glanced out of the windows of the garage doors, stopping in my tracks. _Shit._ Sometime during my packing frenzy, it had begun to rain. And I mean _rain_. The downpour sounded like bullets pounding on the metal roof, and I was shocked I hadn't noticed it before.

_Make delivery. Get bonus. Go home. _I thought, using this as motivation to get into the driver's seat and start the van. _Delivery. Bonus. Home._

_**RAIN! **_The more rational part of my brain thought.

_C'mon. It'll be fun._ Thought the other part. The part that had led me to convince three of my friends to put a condom on every one of Mr. Franklin's chubby fingers as he snored at the front of our Health class.

**You're the reason we're here in the first place. Don't do it, Emmett.** The rational part retorted.

_Oh come on. What's a little rain gonna do?_

**A LITTLE rain?! That is way more than a **_**little**_** rain. You won't be able to see—**

"SHUT UP!" I roared. Call the white coats. Talking to the voices in my head. And letting them make my decisions. "I'm only doing this for Uncle Ben." I told myself. And, if I was being honest, the voices too.

_Good choice, Emmett!_

"I said, shut up!" they were finally silent as I hit the button to open the garage doors, and as I pulled out slowly onto the long, dirt driveway that was slowly turning to mud.

It took nearly all of my concentration to navigate my way through the potholes and toys still littered around from the twins' birthday last Friday, but I still managed to spot Scarlett running through the torrent with a big black bag, waving her arms over her head. I stopped the van with a jolt and stared at her with the look I usually reserved for Dan and Alex. She didn't seem to notice, however, and wrenched the passenger door open, leaping into the seat with more grace than I expected.

"Hey." She said, slightly winded, and wiped the dripping strands of dark blond hair away from her face. The bag was bulging in odd places as she set it on the seat between us.

"Hey…" I said after a pause. The what-the-hell-are-you-doing look was still on my face. "What's in the bag? Dynamite?"

"No." she said, oblivious to my humor, "clothes."

"Clothes? For what?"

"For you, dolt." She stated, rolling her eyes. "I know Dad's having Dan and Alex run to a few shelters and figured he'd only trust you with the Morehead one. Dan would get hopelessly lost and then drown in a ditch and Alex would probably offend someone, get in a fight, and not be able to drive back."

"And…" I prompted after a few seconds of silence.

"And, have you seen this rain?!"

"No, I was just staring really intently at the windshield before." I rolled my eyes, "Of course I've seen it, Scar. So what? I have to make this delivery."

"I figured you'd say that, but it's only gonna get worse, Em. Category onewhen it left the Gulf. It's supposed to be a two when it reaches Morehead at noon, but that only makes it worse. You're not going to be able to make it back before next week at the least. I think it's best if you just stayed at the shelter. At least you wont be on a lopsided bed." She grinned, and I was shocked for the second time in less then ten minutes. Scarlett had always been a bookworm, so I'd never really taken the time to talk to her, assuming she was just another arrogant know-it-all. There was obviously much, much more to Scarlett Allen than I'd always believed.

"Well thanks, Carlie." I said, calling her by her preferred nickname for the first time since I'd arrived. "I didn't think you cared whether or not I went flying off the flooded roads."

"Chalk it up to motherly instinct, Emmett, but I'm not always the person you think I am." As soon as the sentence was out of her mouth, she had hopped out and was sprinting back towards the house, where I could see the twins' faces pressed against the kitchen windows. I waved and their faces broke out into identical grins as they waved back.

Family had never been as important to me as my friends, mostly because the only family I lived near were my parents, and they were always either at work or yelling at me. I'd never really stopped to think about the kind of people my family were, or that they could be friends too. _Well_, I thought, pulling out onto the highway, _there's a first time for everything._

_--_

**Hello all! Hope you liked the first chapter in Emmett's POV of TEOTS. Anyways, if you're interested, there are 5 other authors with whom I'm working on this story--and they're each doing a different point of view on the same story. So, the authors are myself, book2romantic, shaps, Madame Meg, gatorzgurl07, and luvvampluvdog. Any part of the story can be found by searching the title "The Eye of the Storm."**

**Good day fair readers, and don't forget to review!**


	2. Shelter

For the first time in my life, I was truly scared.

This beat out the time my dad had come home drunk, raving and mad and ready to take it out on the closest person—me. It beat out the time our crazy neighbor, Mr. Cakkaloff, had chased after me with his shotgun and a bottle of whiskey, scraggly gray hair exploding around his face like a manic halo, simply for letting a towel blow off the clothesline and into his yard. Hell, it even beat out the time I'd caught my parents going at it when I was twelve. You could say I was pretty much scared shitless.

It wasn't just the rain, or the wind, or the debris strewn across the highway, all of which were pelting me in abundance—it was all of them in combination. The wind however was the worst. It blew me this way and that, to the point where it was hard to stay in my lane, much less on the highway. I had always prided myself on being a rather good driver, my driver's ed teacher had even complimented me a few times on how naturally I navigated the car, but I had never thought I'd reach the moment when I'd wish I could just pull over and stop. I reached that moment forty-five minutes into my trip to Morehead.

_Please, please, PLEASE, _I thought, _don't let me die._

A pinecone flew off one of the tall pines bordering the road, and hit my windshield, making me jump. The desperate thoughts were starting to overwhelm me. I was hunched over the steering wheel, struggling to see even a few feet in front of my tires, but somehow, I managed to sight a small sign on the right side of the highway, informing me that I was less than eight miles away.

Miraculously, I managed to find the shelter, an old though still rather large church, and pulled around to the back entrance. A twist of the keys shut the van down as I opened the door and bolted around to open the double doors in the rear. I grabbed a carton of eggs, easy enough to carry with one arm, and walked as quickly as I could toward the church entrance. I opened the door quickly, yanking the handle toward me so as not to spill my load.

The door led into a crowded hallway lined with doors, obviously converted into makeshift dorms for the temporary guests at the shelter, and as the door shut behind me, I heard a woman's scream and then another door banging shut. As I walked a little ways up the hallway toward a door at the other end, I spotted a brunette girl, red-faced and making her way toward the main room. I was just passing her as she stopped cold, staring at a tall, lanky man who seemed to be registering at a rickety table, piled high with papers.

The door to the kitchen was easy to spot as I entered the main sanctuary—it was the door with friendly-faced volunteers flooding in and out, carrying plates of food for the various people who would be staying in the shelter. The room was crowded, full of displaced families, the homeless with nowhere else to go, and various other miscreants, namely the vicious-looking blond standing in a corner, hugging a leather backpack to his chest.

I made my way across the room, observing and trying not to, until I reached the center aisle of the pews, where a leggy blond, hugging a leather jacket that certainly wasn't bought to fit her, blocked my path.

"Excuse me," I asked politely.

She turned to face me, and I had to struggle not to gasp. There was a large, fist shaped bruise on her right cheek, and a trail of mascara running over the top of it. I wasn't sure if the makeup malfunction was due to the rain pouring down outside or to tears.

She cringed back as I nudged her side, falling into the wall as if she could melt back into it. I shot her a questioning look, but didn't say anything. Her eyes, ice blue and possibly the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my life, were sad and distant, as if she were in mourning. I knew enough of that look to know she wasn't going to speak to me, so I continued to walk to the kitchen, though I couldn't help shooting a few looks back to her. So many unfortunates in the world, hell, even just in this shelter, but sometimes, all you wanted was someone to understand. Well, I thought I knew what she was going through, but the hell if I was going to poke into someone else's business. That was what family was for.

--

"Thanks," said Jeff, a rather skinny but helpful volunteer who had helped me carry the rest of the van's contents back to the kitchen. "We really needed all this food. There's just no telling how long we're going to be stuck here, it all depends on where the storm passes, how safe it is to drive, how many power lines go down…"

He continued to ramble on about all the things that could possibly go wrong during a hurricane—I took it that he was a native, as he kept rambling off names of local sheriffs and fire fighters—and I began to realize that Scarlett had been right to bring me out a bag. Jeff may have been blowing this hurricane a bit out of proportion, but even so, I definitely was not going to be able to make it back to Allen Farms tonight.

"It's cool, man," I told Jeff, interrupting his elaborate description of a thirty-foot tree falling on top of his house when he was younger.

"Yeah…sure…" his voice trailed off as he realized I hadn't been listening to a word he'd said. I continued up a set of stairs back to the main room of the church, not even expecting to see the blond as she'd disappeared, probably into one of the dorm rooms, after that first time I'd run into her.

The woman at the makeshift desk with all the papers was silently shuffling them into piles, a good-natured smile on her face as I walked up.

"Excuse me?" I asked her.

"Oh!" she said, "You startled me a bit there!"

"I'm sorry, but I was just wondering if this is where I register? I'm here from Allen Farms, I just came to drop off some supplies for y'all, but it doesn't seem to look as if I'll be able to make it back tonight."

"Oh, yes, of course! Here are some papers, just fill out whatever you can, and I'll try to get you into a room."

"Thank you," I told her as she handed me a packet of papers stapled together, asking for basic information: name, phone number, address, medical information, etc.

I sat down on one of the hard pews—something I hadn't done since my mother gave up church when I was nine—and pulled a pen out of my shirt pocket to begin filling out the forms. I filled out the name and social security information easily, but when I came to the address portion, I stopped. Did they want my aunt and uncle's residence or my own? What was this for, in case I died and they had to contact someone? This last thought made my decision for me. If I died, I wanted Uncle Ben to be the first to know. My parents would care, or at least I hoped they would, but Uncle Ben had been more of a family to me than they had ever been.

_1401 West Cartham Street_, I wrote in the blank, satisfied with my decision. House or home? I'd solved my own internal dilemma with a few scribbled letters and numbers, here on the worn seat of a pew bench, the last place I ever thought I'd end up deciding to change.

--

**Okay, so definitely not the longest chapter I've ever written, but at least it's something.**

**IM NOT THE ONLY ONE WRITING THIS! The other authors are:**

**Eevy Angel writing Rosalie.  
Luvvampluvdog writing Edward.  
gatorzgurl07 writing Bella.  
book2romantic writing Jasper.  
Shaps writing Alice.**

**I hope you'll take the time to read their POV's they're ALL wonderful and terrific and great and a lot of other adjectives I can't come up with right now. And also, because everyone else seems to be doing it and I don't want to be the odd one out, I'll pose a question. What, exactly, is your favorite article of clothing? (favorite t-shirt, comfy sweats, etc.)**

**Au revoir!**


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